How to Overcome Doubt When Building a Business

The key to running a small business smoothly is overcoming doubt when starting your business.

Many people compare falling in love with an entrepreneurial dream or starting a business to falling in love with a person. In the beginning, its as if you have the heart eyes emoji stamped to your face at all times. You even sort of stalk your business dream like you do the new person you’re dating but instead of checking them out on Facebook, your tool of choice is Google. You find out everything there is to know about this dream and your excitement level is through the roof.

However, there comes a time a few weeks or a few months down the road, when you start to experience cycles of doubt as you build your business. You begin to wonder if this new creative idea is really going to work out and if this even the right dream for you. We’ve all been there and feeling this way is totally normal but what is important is that you don’t stay there in a place of doubt or insecurity. In order to get out of a place of worry and fear, a beginner business owner must replace those emotions of worry and doubt with joy and love.

Here are three tips to do overcome fear, worry, exhaustion and self-doubt when running your own business:

1. Enjoy figuring out the process.

Maybe where you’re at right now isn’t ideal but there is something to be said for finding joy in the journey of it all. Once we make the decision to follow our dreams, we must trust that we will eventually figure it out. So instead of letting this time period where you are figuring it out frustrate you, embrace it. Often times in the beginning stages of building a business, the reason we go into research overdrive is because we want to avoid messing up. However, there really is no such thing as messing up, its all just trial and error.

I know this can be easier said than done, so I want to invite you to take a little journey back to 7th grade science class. I’m sure you remember that for every experiment, your teacher asked you to form a hypothesis. This is because scientists never claim that every experiment they do is going to work out. However, they don’t let this doubt stand in their way. If something doesn’t work out, they simply tweak and repeat and they seem to enjoy this process because its part of the fun for them. Can you imagine if everything always worked out on the first try? How boring would that be? Part of the fun is testing out a bunch of things and jumping for joy when one of them finally works. Embrace your journey whole heartily.

2. Create a vision board.

Feelings of doubt typically come from a lack of not being able to see the future. Human problems, am I right? Well unfortunately, I have no tips for how to actually see the future, but a vision board is the next best thing. Simply cut out pictures, words, and phrases that represent your ideal life and glue them to a giant piece of paper. Then, put this vision board somewhere that you will see it everyday. Lastly, commit to spending 3-5 minutes each morning looking at the board and visualizing everything on there coming to life. The more you can see these things becoming a reality, the less doubt you will have.

3. Keep a record of your progress.

As entrepreneurs we tend to set these huge goals for ourselves and we don’t allow ourselves to be happy until we achieve them. The problem with that is, big goals take time and if we wait months or even years in between celebrations, we are going to get discouraged and give up. So make sure to celebrate the small wins too. Did you wake up an hour early to work on your side hustle before going to your 9-5? That’s a win. Did you receive a thoughtful, kind comment on your most recent Instagram post? That’s a win too. A fun way to add these little celebrations into your routine is to start a gratitude journal. Write down 1 small win at the end of each day and then at the end of the month, reflect on all of the beautiful moments of joy you had throughout that month.